Art is relative; it reflects the spirit of the age, creates opportunities for debate, is popular or provocative, conforms or resists. Irrespective of the reception of its innumerable forms and possibilities, art has always had its opponents, who would question new trends and attempt to enforce thought in line with an ideology.

It has always been totalitarian systems that have felt most threatened by freedom of spirit and sought ways to stifle it. Public denunciations of artists and bans on their works are standard measures in the repertoire of such states. Campaigns vilifying artists and their works reached their apogee in the years 1933–1945, when National Socialist cultural policy enabled state instrumentalisation of all areas of art.

The period of the Third Reich was a time when people were hunted down like wild animals, humiliated, driven out and murdered.

 Among those who suffered in this way were artists both well known and unjustly forgotten today, representatives of all disciplines of art, who because of the modern means of expression they adopted, their aesthetic choices or their political views came into conflict with the aesthetic and ideological ideal of the “German” artist. This was sufficient reason for the National Socialist state to implement repressions against them. State-sanctioned persecution was made possible by new laws, and by the creation of a Third Reich Chamber of Culture, whose various departments engineered the subordination of art to the exclusive service of the state and its reputation.

Recently there have been numerous exhibitions of forbidden art, presenting the work of artists such as Max Beckmann, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Otto Dix. Few curators have taken the step of treating the visual arts, literature and music on a par, however, and fewer still have presented work by artists now forgotten.

The guiding principle behind the interdisciplinary exhibition Hunting down the avant garde. Forbidden art in the Third Reich, then, is to show on the one hand the complexity of the National Socialist cultural policy system, and on the other works by artists both well known and forgotten today, persecuted, expelled and excluded just like the Third Reich’s many other victims.

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Polowanie na awangardę. Zakazana sztuka w Trzeciej Rzeszy

Rok 1933 wraz z objęciem przez Adolfa Hitlera urzędu Kanclerza otworzył niechlubny i bolesny rozdział w historii Niemiec. W hitlerowskiej wizji nie było miejsca dla niezależnie myślących, hołdujących awangardzie twórców – i to właśnie tym artystom została poświęcona ta publikacja: partnerski projekt Międzynarodowego Centrum Kultury i Rhineland Regional Council. W albumie można zobaczyć dzieła zaliczone przez nazistów do tak zwanej sztuki zwyrodniałej (entartete Kunst).

Author of the publication: Praca zbiorowa

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